| Description |
Everyone has to deal with human conditions of disease, poor health, mental and physiological ills, chronic ailments or acute medical emergencies, at times on a very personal basis. One's own health problems or those of one's family inevitably bring about the need to seek medical help, to describe and become aware of symptoms as danger signals, to find health care providers, and to select appropriate treatment. In addition to one's personal needs, every citizen wishing to participate in decision making, designing appropriate health care policies for local and national needs, has to understand options, alternatives, economic restrictions, and the potentials and limitations of science and technology. Such decisions must be based on information, on using the accumulated knowledge dealing with health. This knowledge in general is restricted to the professionals, to the medical practitioners acting as the privileged control group. As a practicing library administrator, active in the academic medial library setting, I am acutely aware of the abundance of scientific literature in the medical field and of its lack of accessibility to most of the potential and ultimate beneficiaries of such information. Medical libraries are well organized to serve professional needs. With the help of federal subsidies, their information resources have become the most comprehensive specialized library system of the nation. Modern technology and information management skills have created a unique knowledge base, as yet greatly untapped by the general public. The realities of dealing with restrictive policies of "public" libraries and educational instruction, the undemocratic practices of many governmental agencies and private services controlling information have become a concern to me throughout my professional experience as a librarian. My informal but through assessment of the librarians' attitudes, through professional contacts, underscored my interest to investigate their justifiability. This questioning became more conscious during my public administration internship in the library setting. The concern with the information needs of functioning democracy and the reasons, historical and psychological, for present attitudes, were the object of my literature research, were also the prevalent communication patterns and control of information flow in health care and medicine. Attitudes, philosophical and ethical justification, were well represented in the last decade's descriptive and analytical writings which were found pertinent. They explain and give reasons for the existence of professional control of health science information. However, they do not succeed in justifying such attitudes. I believe that the medical library profession, now dedicated almost exclusively to the physician and his subordinate heath professionals, can and should address this issue and bring about some liberating change. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the existing limited health knowledge of the general public and to document the ethical and practical desirability of opening doors to those, seeking health information. As methodology, I chose a through literature survey, discussing information. As methodology, I chose a through literature survey, discussing information as one of the bases for a democratic society, information amounting to control and power. The perspective is that of a librarian struggling under the limitation of a traditional service orientation, accountable only to one established authority group. Reference to already existing and developing consumers and library trends to broaden the access to medical information were gathered, which suggest the feasibility and timeliness of a less elitist, more consumer-oriented health information service. |
